Thursday, August 11, 2005

Unraveling the SES-Health Connection

"People of lower socio-economic status (SES) appear to always have much worse health outcomes. At least until the end of life, at each age every movement down in income is associated with being in poorer health. While a debate rages on about competing reasons why SES may affect health, there is little recognition that the so-called reverse causation from health to economic status may be pretty fundamental as well. Even if the direction of causation is that SES mainly affects health, what dimensions of SES actually matter — the financial aspects such as income or wealth or non-financial dimensions like education? Finally, is there a life course component to the health gradient so that we may be mislead in trying to answer these questions by only looking at people of a certain age — say those past 50. This paper, which is divided into four sections, provides my answers to these questions." Source: RAND Corporation

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